The present invention is directed to a method and apparatus for creating a dynamic grammar and, in particular, to a method and apparatus that creates such a dynamic grammar in accordance with an externally provided set of criteria.
As computers become more sophisticated, both in the ever-increasing amount of data they can store and process and in the ever-increasing speed at which they communicate with one another, certain institutions have begun to automate those tasks that had heretofore required labor-intensive efforts to accomplish. One such task is processing bill payments from customers. Although companies have for some time now employed large databases to keep track of their customer accounts, most companies still manage their account receivables by printing and mailing out paper bills. This traditional bill payment system has worked quite well in the past but is beginning to burst at the seams with the huge increases in mail volume that occur each year. As the postal service creaks and buckles under this perpetual avalanche of paper, the likelihood of mail being lost, misdelivered, or at least delayed increases. Moreover, as successful companies add more people to their customer rolls, the task of handling paper bills for each of these customers requires companies to spend more money to hire more people and machines to handle outgoing and incoming bills.
Attempts by companies to reduce the enormous volume of paper they must print and mail to customers has prompted some to allow customers to send bill payments electronically. Certain of these automated bill payment systems allow customers to access a company's bill payment system either through a computer or through a conventional telephone. Once a customer is connected to a particular company, he can authorize his bank to send payment to the company; thus, the company can receive payments in a more timely manner and at the same time reduce the expenses that are associated with a paper-based billing system. The drawback, however, is that most customers have several bills to pay each month. If a customer wishes to pay all of his bills electronically, the customer would have to initiate a separate communication with each company to which he intends to send payment. For those people who send monthly bills to several different companies, the task of calling or logging on to each company on a separate basis discourages customers from using a system that if used widely would reduce the reliance on paper, reduce the pressure on our postal service, and provide customers as a whole the near-instantaneous certainty that their payments have been properly credited to their accounts. In order to address this concern, several banks allow customers to log into their computer systems and direct payments to those companies that participate in the bank's electronic bill payment system. Although customers can pay several different bills from one electronic “location” with this type of system, such systems may be prone to delays in accessing the pre-stored computer files relating to the desired recipient company if the number of participating companies becomes excessively large. When such a system must keep track of an excessively large amount of companies, the time needed for the system to respond to a customer's request to send payment is slowed by the cumbersome search the system must perform among the many thousands of entries in its database. Furthermore, given a system that stores thousands of company names, if a user can identify a company to receive payment by speaking the company name, the chance of the system confusing acoustically similar company names (e.g., “AT&T” with “NT&T”) is great, especially if the system must search through the entire company database in order to match the user-provided input. What is therefore needed is a system that would, instead of conducting such a global database search in order to access a desired data item stored therein, first creates a dynamic grammar that is limited to those data items pertaining to a current customer's account and then conduct the search for the intended recipient of the customer's communication among the data items within this grammar alone.